Bird Life in the Dales

Posted on June 27, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ve just been to the Dales Countryside Museum for the ‘big handover’ of all of the prints that I’ve taken from Marie Hartley’s wood engraving blocks. There are two sets of 129 prints made from 127 blocks (2 were double-sided!). I had to leave the linocuts unprinted because they’d degraded over time and become hard, cracked and warped. I didn’t want to damage them further and, although I tentatively tried to print one block, I wouldn’t have been able to get a decent print from them. I’m really happy to have played a part in this important archive and to help realise one of Fiona Rosher’s dreams for the museum. I then spent a couple hours reading some of Marie’s diaries that she wrote when she was working and living with Ella Pontefract and then Joan Ingilby.

The diaries often contain illustrations, poetry, natural objects, christmas cards & other ephemera.

I have just read the heart-breaking entries from the time of Ella’s death and the year anniversary of it. I will write a little more about the women’s lives and the important part that Joan’s friendship played in helping Marie to recover in another post. The diaries that I have just been reading were written before, during and after the second world war and provide a fascinating insight into how it affected the people living in the Dales.

An entry from 1950 which included petrol rationing tokens.

I’m currently visiting different areas of the Dales (written about in Marie’s books) with a view to collecting ideas for new work and I’m taking photos and making notes of what I see. I’ve got various lists of all the wildlife that I’ve been seeing and I was delighted to find numerous entries in Marie’s diaries that record the birds that she saw each year.

I think that one of the most poignant things is the fact that she refers to seeing corncrakes near Askrigg and these have now vanished from the Yorkshire Dales. I’ve been out and about and seen some really amazing wildlife. Here are some collages of photos taken on my visits to Muker, Keld, Penyghent, Plover Hill and Semerwater.

Top L-R: lamb on Kisdon, eggshell at Snaizeholme, Lapwing above Stalling Busk. Middle L-R: Red squirrel at Snaizeholme, Curlew, fox cub. Bottom L-R: pied wagtail at Malham, me on Kisdon!, sheep on Kisdon.

Top L-R: primroses on Kisdon, cloudberry on Plover Hill, Birds Eye Primrose near Yockenthwaite. Middle L-R: Saxifrage on Plover Hill, Bluebells on Kisdon, Mountain primrose on Penyghent. Bottom L-R: cotton grass on Plover Hill, Purple Saxifrage on Penyghent, meadows at Muker

Top L-R: Oyster catcher at Keld, Wheatear at Muker, Ring Ouzel near Plover Hill. Middle L-R: Sandpiper at Kisdon Force, Lapwing above Stalling Busk, sported flycatcher at Muker. Bottom L-R: Meadow Pipit on Penyghent, canada geese with goslings on Semerwater, grey wagtail at Kisdon Force.

I often run my routes because it means that I can go further and to places that I wouldn’t get to when walking. I don’t mind getting wet in bogs or scrambling through heather when I’m in my running shoes and I also find that I see far more wildlife and the animals and birds seem less bothered by me. I often spot things and hide out of sight so I can watch without disturbing. For me, these times are some of the most joyful in life. I gain a clarity of thought and I often solve solutions to my printmaking conundrums as I’m running up a hill or across an open moor. Running can be meditative and it is the perfect counterpoint to my sedentary days in the studio.

A golden plover seen near the cairn at the summit of Kisdon yesterday.

I carry a small Canon Powershot camera that fits in my hand or a bumbag and I chose one with a powerful zoom lens. I’m really enjoying sketching from life for this project and am looking forward to doing more landscape studies ‘in the field’ but it is virtually impossible for me to draw fleeting encounters with birds and animals and so I have always spent time watching to get to know them and then used my huge reference library of photos to help me get accurate details in my prints. The rest is then left to my imagination, my memory of landscape and artistic licence! I have enormous respect for the likes of Robert Gillmor who has spent a lifetime studying and drawing birds from life in order to make his exquisite prints.

Top: Studies from life of grasses and meadow plants which were made to understand the structure for when I am cutting my collagraph prints. Below: lapwing studies made from my photographs to help me understand how they fly so that I can make prints that capture the essence of their behaviour.

Marie, Ella and Joan spent their lifetimes getting to know the Yorkshire Dales and their books are as much about the people living there as of the land itself. Marie’s diaries have many entries about time spent with fascinating people learning about life and traditions in the Yorkshire Dales. Whilst I’m not aiming to write a book about the people of the Dales, I do hope that the artwork I make will show how the landscape has been shaped and moulded by the farming, mining and other human interactions with the land and how, in many cases, that has made incredible habitats for wildlife to thrive. As a result of this project, I’ve already met some really interesting farmers and landowners who have made conservation a priority in their work and I hope that will be reflected in some of my prints.

Hibernation!

Posted on January 25, 2013 by hestercoxprintmaker

It’s January, the snow is thick on the ground and the studio is rather chilly but it has been so good to have a month where I don’t have masses of commitments and can take stock a bit.

I started to run an evening class at Number Six in Pateley Bridge but, with only four students coming to the first session, we decided (with NYCC Adult Learning Services permission) to run the remainder of the course as three fortnightly 6 hour workshops. The course looks like it will soon be full and I have my Monday nights back without the prospect of having to drive over the moors in snow and ice every week so we’re all winners there! I taught a monotype workshop to the Northallerton Art Club last weekend and that was very enjoyable with seven creative people making some beautiful prints using direct drawn, reductive & collage methods. Now I have the rest of the month and much of February free to make some new prints for my exhibitions in March, to work on my bookmaking for Joan Newall’s course and to slowly develop some of my ideas started in Sweden.

I was lucky enough to run into Heather and David Cook, both painter/printmakers, in Malham the other day and they kindly showed me some of their latest work and David discussed his brilliant exposure unit that he has made to make his Imagon plates. I’m hoping to make something similar so that I can continue my photopolymer experiments. So there are lots of plans afoot. The only problem is that it is winter! I actually quite like this time of year especially when we have sharp frosts or snow. As a fellrunner, I like nothing more than running through virgin snow and marvelling at the purity of the landscape but the downside is that during the rest of the time, I seem to slow right down!

I always look forward to January and February and the chance to work on some new projects and I imagine how much I’ll get achieved and how I’ll spend everyday making lots of exciting new things but the reality is that during the darkness hours, I’m sleepy and just feel like curling up with a book, some poetry or a good film. I’ve got a lovely stack of books to work through including two from Robert MacFarlane (The Old Ways & Mountains of the Mind), ‘Man with a Blue Scarf’ which is Martin Gayford’s diary of sitting for Lucien Freud, Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr, The Snow Tourist by Charlie English and I’m just part way through ‘If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things’. Added to that is regular dipping into the poetry of Kathleen Jamie and Norman MacCaig and random admiration of the prints in Carry Ackroyd’s ‘Nature Powers and Spells’ and you can see that I have plenty to keep me occupied!

Despite slowing down, I am still working on a new collagraph, taking a fox, the snow and the birch forests as inspiration, which will be for my exhibition ‘Telling Tales’ with Jane Littlefield at Rural Arts in March. I’ll be making a couple new bird prints too. I’m so used to working every hour available that it feels a bit lazy not to! I read in a fellow artist’s blog that she felt that when she made the shift to being a full-time artist, she was suddenly doing something that she had crammed into her spare time all of the time and she found it hard to know what to do with her leisure time. I feel like that. Art is what I do and I rarely switch off from it because I love it and everything around me is part of it. I am also totally self-supported so I have a strong drive to use all my available time to create the work that will keep me clothed, housed and fed!

However, I have decided to stop worrying about not burning the candle at both ends and enjoy this chance to recharge and take stock before the frenetic activity that will no doubt ensue in the coming months. I’m dividing my weeks into days for working on my prints from Sweden and researching what I need to get started with my photopolymer printing and make my exposure unit, days to make some new collagraphs for my exhibitions in March and the rest of the time to get somewhere with my bookmaking and do my admin. Joan taught us how to make lined boxes with lids in our last class and it has given me an idea for this year’s final project. The photo shows my box covered in my handmade paper. Our theme this year is ‘worn surfaces’ and I’m using ‘A Tale’ by Edward Thomas as my starting point. More on that in another post.

January also brings the dreaded tax return! Self-assessment online makes it a bit easier but the whole process is one that I don’t relish. I try and make it slightly more interesting by totting up which galleries have sold the most prints over the year and which prints have sold the best for me. This has the added benefit of reminding me which galleries I need to keep a special eye on. The ones that sell the best obviously need to have their stocks replenished regularly and sometimes if the managers are too busy to send out requests, the onus is on me to offer to deliver more work. The ones that aren’t selling need a phone call to find out if the prints are still on display and if anything needs returning or swapped.

In 2011/12, Cambridge Contemporary Art was my top selling gallery, hotly followed by The Gallery in Masham (Josie has been selling my prints consistently for 19 years and is invariably one of my best selling galleries!), then ArtsBank at Saltburn. All three galleries have a few things in common that I think make them not only successful, but a pleasure to work with. Firstly, I always know I will be paid for the prints that I’ve sold on or around a certain date of the following month, the paperwork is always thorough and I trust the people that I am dealing with. The gallery owners have very proactive publicity campaigns and are constantly updating their websites, sending out newsletters and using social media to promote exhibitions and their artists. I also get regular emails or phone calls to let me know if customers are interested in prints that are not currently in the galleries, to order more work from me and to offer me exhibiting opportunities. In return, I try really hard to promote the galleries when they put on exhibitions of my prints, always send detailed and clear paperwork with my deliveries and try and deliver any orders as soon as I can. The relationship is like any successful partnership, it requires trust and plenty of attention on both sides.

My list of gallery sales also shows me where some of the outlets aren’t performing very well and then I can decide what to do about it. This could be for all sorts of good reasons but ultimately, every print that sits unsold is a potential sale elsewhere and at one gallery, five of the unsold prints were the last in the editions so I was pretty keen to get them back and into one of my more successful outlets. It is quite hard when you sell your work across the UK because keeping an eye on it can be tricky and when I’m busy, I’m not always very good at keeping on top of this kind of thing so now is the time for doing any chasing up that needs doing. Some of the galleries only sell a handful of prints each year but so long as there are a few sales and I have a good relationship with the owner, I am happy to have my prints there. You never know who might see them and it is better to have them on a gallery wall than sat at home in my studio.

My top selling prints for 2011/12 were The Return (only one left):

A Flight of Swallows (still available):

and in joint third, Rookery (which has sold out):

and The Woodcat (still some available):

So its a quiet time for me but a good one. I’m running most days to keep SAD at bay, keep me inspired and to enliven me for the time spent in my studio and I’m going to make the most of getting plenty of sleep and time to think before I’m back to busy times of eating on the move and midnight printing!

Final Days at Ålgården

Posted on October 12, 2012 by hestercoxprintmaker

I started this post whilst I was still at Ålgården but I had so much to do before I left that I never got the chance to finish it so here it is! The final days of my residency were quite intense but very satisfying. On Sunday I successfully exposed my latest graphite drawing as a photopolymer plate. Here is one of the first proofs. I forgot to mention the fact that all my prints are being printed onto cream Hahnemüle paper which accounts for the slightly pink/cream looking photos

I’ve been a bit obsessed with puddles in the forest and wanted to capture something of the feel of the pine forest after the rain.

It was also a beautiful afternoon on Sunday so I went for a long run with my camera to try and get as many photos as possible. I have built up a really good image bank that I hope will help me to continue my Swedish work during the winter months in the UK.

I then went into the studio with the intention of making some small monotypes of the autumn colour in the birch forest. However, I found myself making an enormous grey (not even black) monotype of the birches and it took me ages. I was so tired that I almost gave up on it but forced myself to finish. I think I wanted to make the most of having access to the huge press but it was a bit of a mistake. On Sunday night I thought it was an awful print but I looked at it in the cold light of Monday morning and it wasn’t so bad and will be useful as a reminder of things now that I am back home. Although it hasn’t travelled too well and will need resoaking. I packed all my prints up very carefully and they were fine but this was so big that I had to roll it and stow it in my case. Needless to say it is now squashed flat!

On Monday Ida Brogren, artist and illustrator http://www.syskonenbrogren.se, arrived with her camera and she took photos of me exposing the monotype transparency onto the photopolymer plate. Here are the two transparencies stuck together (there is a lot of overlap of ink).

Following all the steps described in my previous post, we exposed and developed the plate. I also exposed an identical plate using the same timings but using the aquatint screen that Björn had given me to see what the difference was. This is a picture (taken by Ida) of Christina and me examining the screens.

I’m chuffed to bits with the proof prints! (Here is the one made from the plate using the studio’s aquatint screen:

and the one made using Björn’s screen:

The dots on the above screen are more open and so you get a rougher and more grainy effect. It would be interesting on certain prints though and it is great to have it to start me off. Björn has also given me the details of the man in Gothenburg that makes the aquatint screen that I used. It would be a good investment for me to order one from him once I have made my lightbox.

I spent the rest of Monday printing and organising all my stuff for transporting back to the UK. I then found out that Modhir Ahmed was coming back to Ålgården to film people looking at his exhibition and then sharing their thoughts on his paintings. He arrived in the late afternoon and Ida stayed behind to help with the filming. She also made a beautiful meal for us of pea soup with creme fraiche and caviar with olive ciabatta and her friend arrived with the most delicious apple cake. It was a nice surprise because I’d intended working through and just snacking on a bowl of cereal! 🙂

Once we’d eaten, Modhir insisted that we were filmed looking at his paintings. I have to admit that I was a bit reluctant due to the large amount of work that I wanted to do on my last night but I managed to say a few words that I hope were meaningful before scuttling back to the studio. It got to about midnight and I decided that I needed to wind down a bit so I went to the lithography studio and made some acetate screens to take back to England. You may remember that this involves using a large and a small lithography stone with carborundum and water and it is a meditative thing to do. I made four which took about 25 minutes so I felt quite relaxed by the time I went to bed.

Tuesday was my last day at Ålgården and I was determined to say goodbye to the forest so I went for a 5 mile run in the rain. It was lovely with lots of jays and nuthatches flying about and I saw the friendly woodsman and was able to say goodbye to him too. I got back to the studio and Modhir Ahmed had a surprise in store in the gallery. He wanted us to come and look at his exhibition and in the night he had painted over all of his paintings in black and chalked a single English word on each. It was something of a shock but exciting too. He is a very interesting and well-respected artist in Sweden, full of ideas and energy. I found an article on the Ålgården facebook page that talks about it: http://www.bt.se/kulturnoje/konst/konstkuppen-malade-over-tavlorna%283472160%29.gm

I wasn’t able to do any more work but had the whole morning to pack everything up carefully and prepare a couple prints that I wanted to give to Christina and Björn and also one for Lennart who arrived just in time for my farewell lunch. He and Ute had made a print together for me too, I was really touched. Björn made veggie spaghetti bolognese and eight of us sat down to eat together. Then it was time to say goodbye 😦 Anna Mattsson kindly drove me to the airport and it was really good to spend the time with her. I managed to get through the luggage check in even though they had to mark my bag as ‘heavy’ and send it down the oversize baggage chute. They also let me on with a very heavy rucksack as hand luggage and a large parcel of prints. I was quite surprised but the plane turned out to be half empty so perhaps they were being generous with regards to the usual baggage restrictions.

I will really miss everyone that made me so welcome at Ålgården and I will also miss the fantastic opportunity to immerse myself in my printmaking without the pressures to teach or sell my prints. I already feel that it has been an extremely valuable time and I suspect that it will have a profound long-term effect on my printmaking and the way I view my work. Being amongst other professional printmakers in well-equipped studios exchanging ideas and learning new techniques has all the best attributes of being at art college but with the added maturity and insights that come from actually making a career from your artistic practise. I’ve been through some low points and some self-doubt but I have also reaffirmed the fact that printmaking is what makes me tick and is how I want to make my images. I find it exciting that, after eighteen years of printmaking, I am just scratching the surface of what can be done in one small area and now the photopolymer combined with my monotypes could be a whole new avenue for me to explore.

I now have a really hectic couple of months with at least seven group exhibitions to prepare for and two printmaking courses to teach but I have light at the end of the tunnel in the form of the quieter months of December, January and February. I usually find this time quite uninspiring and my creativity is often at a low so I tend to just use it to restock my editions and prepare for the coming months but this winter I want to consolidate some of the ideas that I have had in Sweden, make further prints based on my experience of the forests and explore photopolymer printmaking further and see where that takes me. I need to build a light box but I have good advice from Christina and Björn as well as a good book on the subject and a friendly contact in the form of Rebecca Vincent at Horsley Printmakers (check out her lovely monotypes and etchings http://www.horsleyprintmakers.co.uk/rebecca_vincent.html).

I’ll continue to write here so please do check back in the future to see what I’m up to. Oh yes, I’m already considering the possibility of returning to Sweden once I’ve developed my ideas a bit further and also I am hoping that Art Connections will be able to develop their link with Ålgården. It would be great to see some of the Swedish artists in Yorkshire in the future and perhaps we could collaborate on something. Before I sign off for now, I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone at Ålgården who made me feel so welcome and have become friends and also to Christine Keogh and Rick Faulkner at Art Connections for giving me this opportunity, it’s been just what I hoped for and more!

Tall!

Posted on September 27, 2012 by hestercoxprintmaker

It’s been a good couple of days for a few reasons. The first being that we must have had at least 15 minutes of sunshine today 😉 I’m so grateful that for my first days in Borås we had lovely weather and I was able to get out and sketch a lot. I’ve been out drawing since but it has been a damp experience and I invariably get a wet backside from all the beautiful but very soggy moss. The smaller paths are now little rivers.

Yesterday I got up very early to go and visit a 700 year old pine tree with Lennart. It was quite a long way away (thus the early start) but the forest nearby made the trip doubly worthwhile.

After spending some time getting to know the lovely old tree, we then crossed the busy road and had a walk in an ancient forest full of 300 year old pines and 200 year old spruce trees. The forest was dripping with water and we were wading through some deep puddles but it was eerily quiet and still despite the sea of traffic noise from the road behind us and the lichens hanging from the trees were amazing.

On returning to Ålgården, we had some lunch and then I tried to do some artwork. Unfortunately, the studios are really busy at the moment due to the impending open studios exhibition and I find the constant coming and going distracting. I talked to Christina about it today and she feels the same. She’s preparing for an exhibition and trying to make some new work but has been frustrated that she can’t get absorbed into what she is doing. I combatted the feeling today by holing up in my bedroom and working on a drypoint at the desk listening to the radio. It was lovely and I got a lot done. I often go to the studio in the evenings and work late as it is so peaceful. The residency has been really interesting for many reasons and one is that it has given me insights into what conditions I need for working and about the nature of creativity. I’ve found my way of dealing with times when I feel restless and frustrated. Getting out for a walk or run in the forest brings everything back into focus and I come back feeling full of creative energy and ideas. I then need peace and solitude to work out designs but once they are done, I can enjoy making plates and printing in company. When I look back to college days, I spent my most productive times at home between 8pm & 2am and got far less done in the studio between 9am and 6pm and nowadays in England I am always alone so I don’t really have the same dilemma. However, the downside of working alone all the time is that you don’t have the creative input of other people, you aren’t able to bounce ideas about or be inspired by other artists’ work and it can get quite lonely in the winter. At home I am quite fortunate in that I have good friends to ring or visit, many of whom are artists too, and the internet has been a real asset for all of us that that work alone but need a bit of contact now and again! I do wish there was somewhere like Ålgården in North Yorkshire, it would be really fantastic!

For my last week or so here, I intend to make the most of the facilities and print but I also want to soak up as much of the creative spirit here as I can, exchange thoughts and ideas with the other artists whenever possible and really get the atmosphere of the forests under my skin. I hope I can then draw on it all when I am back at home.

The drypoint that I’ve just printed is inspired by one of the old pine trees in the forest. It is made using drypoint plastic and a single drypoint tool. The first print was too pale. This one still needs some adjustments but the beauty of drypoint is that you don’t need to seal the plates and you can proof it and then make changes if you need to.

The word for this kind of tree (it’s a Scot Pine) in Swedish is Tall! How brilliant is that?

As a footnote, I had my first Swedish ‘conversation’ today. I went for a run and stopped to watch a pair of goldcrests. I was stood peering intently up a pine tree when two men came past with their dogs. They said hello and something indecipherable to me and I said ‘Hej…fagel…kungfagel’ to which they both said ‘ahh’ nodded and one made a gesture with his thumb and forefinger to indicate something very small. I was so pleased that I quickly said ‘Hej da’ and ran away before they said anything else that I couldn’t understand. 🙂 So, I now need to see a dormouse or a bear because I know the words for those!

Up and Down and Up Again!

Posted on September 23, 2012 by hestercoxprintmaker

I haven’t posted here for a few days for a couple reasons. One being that I’ve been quite busy but the other is that I’ve been on a bit of a mental rollercoaster! After a lovely day out with Lennart on Thursday, I came into the studio on Friday morning feeling tired but determined to create that elusive masterpiece that I had convinced myself I had to make 🙂 Unfortunately I also had a rather large backlog of emails to answer, exhibitions details to sort out and general admin for my printmaking back home that I couldn’t put off any longer without risk of losing some valuable opportunities (seven exhibitions coming up in autumn!). That put me in a bad frame of mind. I decided the best thing to do would be to spend the morning getting on top of all of that. This I did, but in the process I became aware of how I’ll be returning into the thick of things. Then I thought I really must get on with some of the slowly germinating seeds of inspiration that I’ve been having here. The thing about being an artist is that you can’t do that. You can’t just pluck a great print from thin air. As the day disappeared, and I was asked a couple times by artists in the studio if I was actually going to do something other than stare at a piece of cardboard, I realised that when I’m trying to draw blood from a stone, I find it even harder when there are people watching so I gave up and went for a run!

The good thing about running is that it can be very meditative and that, combined with the peace of the forest, put me in a more positive mood. I determined that tomorrow would be another day and went to bed!

On Saturday there was a life drawing class in the gallery and I was looking forward to it but had woken with a migraine in the night so I was a bit groggy from medication. However, it was a really good thing to do. It was very difficult. The poses were short, mostly two or three minutes, with a seven, eight and a ten minute pose thrown in. I’m such a slow worker! I was just beginning to loosen up and really gain an understanding of how to tackle the quick sketches and the two hour session was over! Mind you, it really stood me in good stead for later in the day. I also met some great people including an artist who is 98 and arrived by taxi using a scheme which I believe is called ‘Fair Share’ and provides free transport for elderly people presumably because they have done their fair share for society and are due some returns. It strikes me as an excellent idea. She and her friend were not only very talented artists but really interested in discussing my prints and the other work on show in the gallery and they have recommended some exhibitions for me to visit.

After the class, Lennart arrived to take me to the opening of his friend Gunnar Bergh’s exhibition at Flamenska.

My head was still pounding and I felt a little antisocial but Gunnar’s paintings are best described as gentle and full of expression so it was a lovely environment. Once we returned to Ålgården, I was determined to get up into the forest and try and rediscover the feel of being there. I’d been staring so long at all of my photographs that I felt divorced from the atmosphere that you can only feel when you are actually in a place. The six mile hike was very wet but it was so peaceful there and I even managed to do one sketch in a rare break from the rain. I also stopped to listen to the birds and was totally amazed to see the tree that I was stood next to come to life. There were countless small birds flitting about in it. Blue tits, great tits and the best of all, a goldcrest! It came right up to me and put its head on one side looking. I tried not to breath in case I scared it away.

It was a bit of a slow plod back home and despite the lovely time in the woods, I found myself feeling despondent and having a crisis of confidence in what I am doing here. I felt that everything I did was not very good and that I was almost half way through my residency and what had I achieved? Yes…I know! I can laugh about it today. The problem is that migraines can actually effect your whole well-being including your emotions and depression is often a side effect of an attack. I’ve battled with them for years and am happy to say that they are less frequent and less severe than they were due to my healthier and happier lifestyle but when I get them…I sometimes lose all sense of reality.

So, Sunday I woke in the night feeling really sick and ill and had to reach for more tablets. Fortunately the morning brought a reprieve and by lunchtime I was feeling perkier. I had lunch with Christina and Lennart and the always cheery Kristina popped in and out. I spent a few hours holed up in my room sketching a ideas and then I headed out for a long run (slow and steady and with my camera) and explored some new territory.

I made it to Fjällsjön lake first.

It was very wet underfoot and many of the paths were small streams. The forest is full of fungi and there were little wooden houses dotted about in some areas. Very Hansel and Gretel! I got to another swimming lake, Kyperedssjön, which looks lovely except the water is soooo black. It’s a bit spooky! Besides which, I was already cold and wet and there was nobody about so I chickened out of jumping in.

The run was just what I needed to put everything back into perspective and to shake off the last remnants of my migraine. I got back feeling refreshed and positive again. I’m actually sat in the studio surrounded by the detritus of plate making 🙂 I talked to Lennart about creativity today and we discussed how you can’t force things, you have to let them unfold and reveal themselves to you naturally and you don’t know when or where that will be, you just have to have faith that it will happen! He told me that I must be gentle with myself. I wish I could remember precisely how he said it but it made a lot of sense. I’ve remembered why I’m here and what it is all about. I have a sketchbook full of drawings, monoprints and even a fully formed collagraph. There is a wealth of inspiration there and the seeds of a lot of imagery. I’m going to relax and enjoy myself again. After all, I’ve got over two weeks left!

Hester Cox: Printmaker

Thoughts from Hester's printmaking studio and beyond.

Tag Archives: creativity